All responses

David Trey staff

Replied on Dec 07, 2011 - 05:45 UTC

Hello Larry,

unfortunately, it's not possible to change the display order of the oldest overdue tasks.

Currently, whenever you use "overdue" (or "od") within your query, overdue tasks will be split into 2 parts:
- the ones that aren't too old and could still be caught up which are - overdue by 1-5 days,
- tasks overdue by 6 days or more which might be less important if they haven't been completed for more than 6 days.

That said, the order we've used to display overdue tasks is:
- 5 days ago
- 4 days ago
- 3 days ago
- 2 days ago
- yesterday
- [results of the other query]
- 6 days ago
- 7 days ago
etc...

This way, you can avoid missing current tasks if your overdue list would display even weeks of old tasks and put the latest ones at the bottom and still see the most recent ones (hence -- oldest tasks in reverse order for 6+ days).

Still, thank you for your feedback, we appreciate it and will consider adding an option to customize the display of overdue tasks in future development.

That's a great explanation of what it actually does and how someone (not me) might use it.

The designers are making huge assumptions about how users think about "tasks", how we want to work with them, and how we prefer to see things in visual format.

The "still be caught up" idea of yours may well describe a particular view of the world - it certainly jars horribly with mine!

I find it very hard to deal with a timeline that is deliberately discontinuous and counter-intuitive. To-doist hardwired format is

PAST-PRESENT-PAST

Are you saying that really makes sense to you?

And why pick an arbitrary 5 days ago as a fixed limit? It's all very subjective.

A good design would appeal to everyone, and linear date order takes some beating in that regard.

Hope this help, Larry

David Trey staff

Replied on Dec 07, 2011 - 08:09 UTC

Larry,

the current option is indeed one fixed solution, but there are certain technical difficulties to make it more flexible so at the point when this function was introduced, it was a matter of choosing between adding a fixed solution which will work and allow an overview of different query results or not having such option at all.

Todoist is constantly being developed and changed to meet the expectations of all our Customers and more preferences to personalize it will be added in the future. The developers are monitoring all feedback (especially the Votebox) so again, thank you very much for your suggestions, we really appreciate it and it will certainly help us creating a better product for everyone.